Six Days and Sixty Gardens
The last week has been a whirlwind of garden touring. While I may not have visited a full sixty gardens there sure were a lot.
I started last Thursday with an afternoon in Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Park where the lush tapestry of annuals and a modicum of perennials were in their late summer glory. The photo here is of gloriosa daisies with sweet potato vine, shot with my 90mm tilt-shift lens cranked over for a selective focus effect rather than to keep the entire subject sharp. The soft overcast light was very welcome.
On Friday I headed down to Portland, Oregon for the annual Garden Writers Association annual symposium. Saturday we toured several northeast Portland gardens. David Perry and I photographed each other photographing the gardens for the intro slide show to our Sunday morning presentation on making magic with your point & shoot camera. It was a lot of fun working quickly and hand-held. David and I shot some of the same subjects, but saw them completely differently. We each got lots of pats on the back for our program and we saw people putting our suggestions to use when we headed out for the afternoon’s tour.
Sunday afternoon we visited Iseli Nursery and Terra Nova Nurseries, both wholesale growers with well-designed display gardens and fantastic plants. The rain held off until we got back on the bus. Isley specializes in dwarf conifers and Japanese Maples; Terra Nova is best known for introducing exciting Heucheras and other perennials to the marketplace.
Monday our busses took us to the Portland Classical Chinese Garden, the Portland Japanese Garden, the International Rose Test Garden, and the Oregon Zoo where we had dinner. Tuesday we went to several private gardens in Eugene. This morning I went back to the rose garden to make some specimen photos and worked until the wind picked up and I decided I needed to start north to get through Seattle before the traffic got too bad.